Tag: Global Warming

Urgent help needed to water new trees

Lots of newly-planted trees on The Downs and elsewhere are suffering from lack of water in this unusually dry weather.  Many trees are dying.

The soil around the roots of each tree was so dry that (despite the recent rain) it would now take a lot of water to become hydrated.  Your help is urgently needed to water any of these trees that you see.  Even if they look nearly dead, with a lot of water they may come back to life.  These trees were paid for by members of the public and local organisations.

A number of people have raised concerns and Bristol City Council has said that it will now water each tree twice a week.  Some are in good shape – one sponsor has been watering her own tree.

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Just about hanging on…

Last year, the same thing happened and after six months of raising concerns with Bristol City Council, they said that last year’s problems would not happen again and watering would be sorted out for this year.  Much of the cost of planting a new tree is to cover sufficient watering for the first couple of years.

Clearly, it is a terrible waste of trees, time and effort and upsetting for the sponsors for the trees to die.  The Bristol Tree Forum  will keep raising this problem so that future sponsors can be sure that their trees thrive and that dead trees from this year and last year’s plantings are replaced.  A proper guarantee needs to be obtained for the future.

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Too late – these trees on Redland Green are dead

If you know anyone who sponsored one of these trees alert them and encourage them to water their own tree.  If you see a new tree that is dead or dying please email us a location and photo.

Vassili Papastavrou

Trees under threat at the Eastgate Centre – Comments so far…

Many thanks to all of you who have lodged comments on this application (nine so far). Here is one great example:

  1. This proposal flies in the face of the objective of the city council to double tree canopy cover in a generation.
  2. There is clear evidence that climate change is in part being driven by the city heat island effect. Bristol is already two degrees warmer than the surrounding area. A mitigation of this is to ensure that all car parking areas are shaded by trees- and not simply by a perimeter screen, but the use of suitable trees 20 metres apart to cover the entire area. This particular complex already has huge areas of unshaded car parking, and the proposal would only increase this.
  1. The Frome Valley is a key feature of the city’s biodiversity. It is one of a series of wildlife corridors that form a key feature of the attractiveness of the city to humans. This corridor is increasingly being eroded by development. As the River Frome has a huge water catchment area, which is increasingly being developed, creating much greater and faster run off, it floods rapidly and frequently. The fact that flood water is now diverted at the site of the Eastgate shopping centre into the northern stormwater interceptor will not prevent future floods upstream.
  1. Visually this remnant woodland of the Frome Valley is crucial it counteracting the utter ugliness and dreariness of the developed site. This of course originates from the original use of the site as a football and greyhound racing stadium. Bristol deserves better.
  1. What is desperately needed throughout this site is more trees being planted on the land owned by the various firms in the area, and not the destruction of the trees that by happy chance have survived.
  1. The wonderful veteran oak in particular, probably 300 years old, should become the centrepiece of a revival of this dreary area.

This is our earlier blog. Time is running out to lodge your objections. If you want to do so, please lodge your objections here in the Planning application comments section.

These are the Important dates:

Eastgate Trees3

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